His name was Brownell and his reign was brief. He came from the Central
Anglican Scholastic Agency, a soured, clever, reddish man picked up
by the Head at the very last moment of the summer holidays in default
of Macrea (of Macrea’s House) who wired from Switzerland that he had
smashed a knee mountaineering, and would not be available that term.
Looking back at the affair, one sees that the Head should have warned
Mr. Brownell of the College’s outstanding peculiarity, instead of
leaving him to discover it for himself the first day of the term,
when he went for a walk to the beach, and saw “Potiphar” Mullins,
Head of Games, smoking without conceal on the sands. “Pot,” having
the whole of the Autumn Football challenges, acceptances, and Fifteen
reconstructions to work out, did not at first comprehend Mr. Brownell’s
shrill cry of: “You’re smoking! You’re smoking, sir!” but he removed
his pipe, and answered, placably enough: “The Army Class is allowed to
smoke, sir.”
Mr. Brownell replied: “Preposterous!”
Pot, seeing that this new person was uninformed, suggested that he
should refer to the Head.
“You may be sure I shall--sure I shall, sir! Then we shall see!”
Mr. Brownell and his umbrella scudded off, and Pot returned to his
match-plannings. Anon, he observed, much as the Almighty might observe
black-beetles, two small figures coming over the Pebble-ridge a few
hundred yards to his right. They were a Major and his Minor, the
latter a new boy and, as such, entitled to his brother’s countenance
for exactly three days--after which he would fend for himself. Pot
waited till they were well out on the great stretch of mother-o’-pearl
sands; then caused his ground-ash to describe a magnificent whirl of
command in the air.
“Come on,” said the Major. “Run!”
“What for?” said the Minor, who had noticed nothing.
“’Cause we’re wanted. Leg it!”
“Oh, I can do _that_,” the Minor replied and, at the end of the sprint,
fetched up a couple of yards ahead of his brother, and much less winded.
“’Your Minor?” said Pot looking over them, seawards.
“Yes, Mullins,” the Major replied.
“All right. Cut along!” They cut on the word.
“Hi! Fludd Major! Come back!”
Back fled the elder.
“Your wind’s bad. Too fat. You grunt like a pig. Mustn’t do it!
Understand? Go away!”
“What was all that for?” the Minor asked on the Major’s return.
“To see if we could run, you fool!”
“Well, I ran faster than you, anyhow,” was the scandalous retort.
“Look here, Har--Minor, if you go on talking like this, you’ll get
yourself kicked all round Coll. An’ you mustn’t stand like you did when
a Prefect’s talkin’ to you.”
The Minor’s eyes opened with awe. “I thought it was only one of the
masters,” said he.
“Masters! It was Mullins--Head o’ Games. You _are_ a putrid young ass!”
By what seemed pure chance, Mr. Brownell ran into the School Chaplain,
the Reverend John Gillette, beating up against the soft, September rain
that no native ever troubled to wear a coat for.
“I was trying to catch you after lunch,” the latter began. “I wanted to
show you our objects of local interest.”
“Thank you! I’ve seen all _I_ want,” Mr. Brownell answered. “Gillette,
_is_ there anything about me which suggests the Congenital Dupe?”
“It’s early to say, yet,” the Chaplain answered. “Who’ve you been
meeting?”
“A youth called Mullins, I believe.” And, indeed, there was Potiphar,
ground-ash, pipe, and all, quarter-decking serenely below the
Pebble-ridge.
“Oh! I see. Old Pot--our Head of Games.”
“He was smoking. He’s smoking _now_! Before those two little boys,
too!” Mr. Brownell panted. “He had the audacity to tell me that----”
“Yes,” the Reverend John cut in. “The Army Class is allowed to
smoke--not in their studies, of course, but within limits, out of
doors. You see we have to compete against the Crammers’ establishments,
where smoking’s usual.”
This was true! Of the only school in England was this the cold truth,
and for the reason given, in that unprogressive age.
“Good Heavens!” said Mr. Brownell to the gulls and the gray sea. “And I
was never warned!”
“The Head _is_ a little forgetful. _I_ ought to have----But it’s all
right,” the Chaplain added soothingly. “Pot won’t--er--give you away.”
Mr. Brownell, who knew what smoking led to, testified out of his twelve
years’ experience of what he called the Animal Boy. He left little
unexplored or unexplained.
“There may be something in what you say,” the Reverend John assented.
“But as a matter of fact, their actual smoking doesn’t amount to much.
They talk a great deal about their brands of tobacco. Practically, it
makes them rather keen on putting down smoking among the juniors--as an
encroachment on their privilege, you see. They lick ’em twice as hard
for it as _we’d_ dare to.”
“Lick!” Mr. Brownell cried. “One expels! One expels! _I_ know the end
of these practices.” He told his companion, in detail, with anecdotes
and inferences, a great deal more about the Animal Boy.
“Ah!” said the Reverend John to himself. “You’ll leave at the end
of the term; but you’ll have a deuce of a time first.” Aloud:
“We-ell, I suppose no one can be sure of any school’s tendency at
any given moment, but, personally, I should incline to believe that
we’re reasonably free from the--er--monastic microbes of--er--older
institutions.”
“But a school’s a school. You can’t get out of _that_! It’s
preposterous! You must admit _that_,” Mr. Brownell insisted.
They were within hail of Pot by now, and the Reverend John asked him
how Affairs of State stood.
“All right, thank you, sir. How are you, sir?”
“Loungin’ round and sufferin’, my son. What about the dates of the
Exeter and Tiverton matches?”
“As late in the term as we can get ’em, don’t you think, sir?”
“Quite! Specially Blundell’s. They’re our dearest foe,” he explained to
the frozen Mr. Brownell. “Aren’t we rather light in the scrum just now,
Mullins?”
“’Fraid so, sir: but Packman’s playin’ forward this term.”
“_At_ last!” cried the Reverend John. (Packman was Pot’s
second-in-command, who considered himself a heaven-born half-back, but
Pot had been working on him diplomatically.) “He’ll be a pillar, at any
rate. Lend me one of your fuzees, please. I’ve only got matches.”
Mr. Brownell was unused to this sort of talk. “A bad beginning to a bad
business,” he muttered as they returned to College.
Pot finished out his meditations; from time to time rubbing up the
gloss on his new seven-and-sixpenny silver-mounted, rather hot,
myall-wood pipe, with its very thin crust in the bowl.
* * * * *
As the Studies brought back brackets and pictures for their walls, so
did they bring odds and ends of speech--theatre, opera, and music-hall
gags--from the great holiday world; some of which stuck for a term,
and others were discarded. Number Five was unpacking, when Dick Four
(King’s House) of the red nose and dramatic instincts, who with Pussy
and Tertius[1] inhabited the study below, loafed up and asked them “how
their symptoms seemed to segashuate.” They said nothing at the time,
for they knew Dick had a giddy uncle who took him to the Pavilion and
the Cri, and all would be explained later. But, before they met again,
Beetle came across two fags at war in a box-room, one of whom cried
to the other: “Turn me loose, or I’ll knock the natal stuffin’ out of
you.” Beetle demanded why he, being offal, presumed to use this strange
speech. The fag said it came out of a new book about rabbits and foxes
and turtles and niggers, which was in his locker. (_Uncle Remus_ was a
popular holiday gift-book in Shotover’s year: when Cetewayo lived in
the Melbury Road, Arabi Pasha in Egypt, and Spofforth on the Oval.)
Beetle had it out and read for some time, standing by the window,
ere he carried it off to Number Five and began at once to give a
wonderful story of a Tar Baby. Stalky tore it from him because he
sputtered incoherently; McTurk, for the same cause, wrenching it from
Stalky. There was no prep that night. The book was amazing, and full of
quotations that one could hurl like javelins. When they came down to
prayers, Stalky, to show he was abreast of the latest movement, pounded
on the door of Dick Four’s study shouting a couplet that pleased him:
“Ti-yi! Tungalee!
I eat um pea! I pick um pea!”
Upon which Dick Four, hornpiping and squinting, and not at all unlike a
bull-frog, came out and answered from the bottom of his belly, whence
he could produce incredible noises:
“Ingle-go-jang, my joy, my joy!
Ingle-go-jang, my joy!
_I’m_ right at home, my joy, my joy!----”
The chants seemed to answer the ends of their being created for the
moment. They all sang them the whole way up the corridor, and, after
prayers, bore the burdens dispersedly to their several dormitories
where they found many who knew the book of the words, but who, boylike,
had waited for a lead ere giving tongue. In a short time the College
was as severely infected with _Uncle Remus_ as it had been with
_Pinafore_ and _Patience_. King realised it specially because he was
running Macrea’s House in addition to his own and, Dick Four said, was
telling his new charges what he thought of his “esteemed colleague’s”
methods of House-control.
The Reverend John was talking to the Head in the latter’s study,
perhaps a fortnight later.
“If you’d only wired _me_,” he said. “I could have dug up something
that might have tided us over. This man’s dangerous.”
“_Mea culpa!_” the Head replied. “I had so much on hand. Our Governing
Council alone----But what do _We_ make of him?”
“Trust Youth! _We_ call him ‘Mister.’”
“‘Mister Brownell’?”
“Just ‘Mister.’ It took _Us_ three days to plumb his soul.”
“And he doesn’t approve of Our institutions? You say he is On the
Track--eh? He suspects the worst?”
The School Chaplain nodded.
“We-ell. _I_ should say that that was the one tendency we had _not_
developed. Setting aside we haven’t even a curtain in a dormitory, let
alone a lock to any form-room door--there has to be tradition in these
things.”
“So I believe. So, indeed, one knows. And--’tisn’t as if I ever
preached on personal purity either.”
The Head laughed. “No, or you’d join Brownell at term-end. By the way,
what’s this new line of Patristic discourse you’re giving us in church?
I found myself listening to some of it last Sunday.”
“Oh! My early Christianity sermons? I bought a dozen ready made in Town
just before I came down. Some one who knows his Gibbon must have done
’em. Aren’t they good?” The Reverend John, who was no hand at written
work, beamed self-approvingly. There was a knock and Pot entered.
The weather had defeated him, at last. All footer-grounds, he reported,
were unplayable, and must be rested. His idea, to keep things going,
was Big and Little Side Paper-chases thrice a week. For the Juniors, a
shortish course on the Burrows which he intended to oversee personally
the first few times, while Packman lunged Big Side across the inland
and upland ploughs, for proper sweats. There was some question of
bounds that he asked authority to vary; and, would the Head please
say which afternoons would interfere least with the Army Class, Extra
Tuition.
As to bounds, the Head left those, as usual, entirely to Pot. The
Reverend John volunteered to shift one of his extra-Tu classes from
four to five P. M. till after prayers--nine to ten. The whole question
was settled in five minutes.
“_We_ hate paper-chases, don’t we, Pot?” the Headmaster asked as the
Head of Games rose.
“Yes, sir, but it keeps ’em in training. Good night, sir.”
“To go back----” drawled the Head when the door was well shut. “No-o.
I do _not_ think so!... Ye-es! He’ll leave at the end of the term....
A-aah! How does it go? ‘Don’t ’spute wid de squinch owl. Jam de shovel
in de fier.’ Have you come across that extraordinary book, by the way?”
“Oh, yes. _We_’ve got it badly too. It has some sort of elemental
appeal, I suppose.”
Here Mr. King came in with a neat little scheme for the reorganisation
of certain details in Macrea’s House, where he had detected
reprehensible laxities. The Head sighed. The Reverend John only heard
the beginnings of it. Then he slid out softly. He remembered he had not
written to Macrea for quite a long time.
* * * * *
The first Big Side Paper-chase, in blinding wet, was as vile as even
the groaning and bemired Beetle had prophesied. But Dick Four had
managed to run his own line when it skirted Bideford, and turned up at
the Lavatories half an hour late cherishing a movable tumour beneath
his sweater.
“Ingle-go-jang!” he chanted, and slipped out a warm but coy
land-tortoise.
“My Sacred Hat!” cried Stalky. “Brer Terrapin! Where you catchee? What
you makee-do _aveck_?”
This was Stalky’s notion of how they talked in _Uncle Remus_; and he
spake no other tongue for weeks.
“I don’t know yet; but I had to get him. ’Man with a barrow full of ’em
in Bridge Street. ’Gave me my choice for a bob. Leave him alone, you
owl! He won’t swim where you’ve been washing your filthy self! ‘_I_’m
right at home, my joy, my joy.’” Dick’s nose shone like Bardolph’s as
he bubbled in the bath.
Just before tea-time, he, “Pussy,” and Tertius broke in upon Number
Five, processionally, singing:
“Ingle-go-jang, my joy, my joy!
Ingle-go-jang, my joy!
I’m right at home, my joy, my joy!
Ingle-go-jang, my joy.”
Brer Terrapin, painted _or_ and _sable_--King’s House-colours--swung by
a neatly contrived belly-band from the end of a broken jumping-pole.
They thought rather well of taking him in to tea. They called at one or
two studies on the way, and were warmly welcomed; but when they reached
the still shut doors of the dining-hall (Richards, ex-Petty Officer, R.
N., was always unpunctual--but they needn’t have called him “Stinking
Jim”) the whole school shouted approval. After the meal, Brer Terrapin
was borne the round of the form-rooms from Number One to Number Twelve,
in an unbroken roar of homage.
“To-morrow,” Dick Four announced, “we’ll sacrifice to him. Fags in
blazin’ paper-baskets!” and with thundering “Ingle-go-jangs” the Idol
retired to its shrine.
It had been a satisfactory performance. Little Hartopp, surprised
labelling “rocks” in Number Twelve, which held the Natural History
Museum, had laughed consumedly; and the Reverend John, just before
prep, complimented Dick that he had not a single dissenter to his
following. In this respect the affair was an advance on Byzantium and
Alexandria which, of course, were torn by rival sects led by militant
Bishops or zealous heathen. _Vide_, (Beetle,) _Hypatia_, and (if Dick
Four ever listened, instead of privily swotting up his Euclid, in
Church) the Reverend John’s own sermons. Mr. King, who had heard the
noise but had not appeared, made no comment till dinner, when he told
the Common Room ceiling that he entertained the lowest opinion of Uncle
Remus’s buffoonery, but opined that it might interest certain types
of intellect. Little Hartopp, School Librarian, who had, by special
request, laid in an extra copy of the book, differed acridly. He
had, he said, heard or overheard every salient line of _Uncle Remus_
quoted, appositely too, by boys whom he would not have credited with
intellectual interests. Mr. King repeated that he was wearied by the
senseless and childish repetitions of immature minds. He recalled the
_Patience_ epidemic. Mr. Prout did not care for _Uncle Remus_--the
dialect put him off--but he thought the Houses were getting a bit
out of hand. There was nothing one could lay hold of, of course--“As
yet,” Mr. Brownell interjected darkly. “But this larking about in
form-rooms,” he added, “had potentialities which, if _he_ knew anything
of the Animal Boy, would develop--or had developed.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said the Reverend John. “This is the first time
to my knowledge that Stalky has ever played second-fiddle to any one.
Brer Terrapin was entirely Dick Four’s notion. By the way, he was
painted _your_ House-colours, King.”
“Was he?” said King artlessly. “I have always held that our Dickson
Quartus had the rudiments of imagination. We will look into it--look
into it.”
“In our loathsome calling, more things are done by judicious letting
alone than by any other,” the Reverend John grunted.
“I can’t subscribe to that,” said Mr. Prout. “_You_ haven’t a House,”
and for once Mr. King backed Prout.
“Thank Heaven I haven’t. Or I should be like you two. Leave ’em alone!
Leave ’em alone! Haven’t you ever seen puppies fighting over a slipper
for hours?”
“Yes, but Gillette admits that Dickson Quartus was the only begetter
of this manifestation. I wasn’t aware that the--er--Testacean had been
tricked out in _my_ colours,” said King.
And at that very hour, Number Five Study--“prep” thrown to the
winds--were toiling inspiredly at a Tar Baby made up of Beetle’s
sweater, and half-a-dozen lavatory-towels; a condemned cretonne curtain
and ditto baize table-cloth for “natal stuffin’”; an ancient, but
air-tight puntabout-ball for the head; all three play-box ropes for
bindings; and most of Richard’s weekly blacking allowance for Prout’s
House’s boots to give tone to the whole.
“Gummy!” said Beetle when their curtain-pole had been taken down and
Tar Baby hitched to the end of it by a loop in its voluptuous back. “It
looks pretty average indecent, somehow.”
“You can use it this way, too,” Turkey demonstrated, handling the
curtain-pole like a flail. “Now, shove it in the fireplace to dry an’
we’ll wash up.”
“But--but,” said Stalky, fascinated by the unspeakable front and behind
of the black and bulging horror. “How _come_ he lookee so hellish?”
“Dead easy! If you do anything with your whole heart, Ruskin says, you
always pull off something dam’-fine. Brer Terrapin’s only a natural
animal; but Tar Baby’s Art,” McTurk explained.
“I see! ‘If you’re anxious for to shine in the high æsthetic line.’
Well, Tar Baby’s the filthiest thing _I_’ve ever seen in my life,”
Stalky concluded. “King’ll be rabid.”
The United idolaters set forth, side by side, at five o’clock next
afternoon; Brer Terrapin, wide awake, and swimming hard into nothing;
Tar Baby lurching from side to side with a lascivious abandon that made
Foxy, the School Sergeant, taking defaulters’ drill in the Corridor,
squawk like an outraged hen. And when they ceremoniously saluted
each other, like aristocratic heads on revolutionary pikes, it beat
the previous day’s performance out of sight and mind. The very fags,
offered up, till the bottoms of the paper-baskets carried away, as
heave-offerings before them, fell over each other for the honour; and
House by House, when the news spread, dropped its doings, and followed
the Mysteries--not without song.
Some say it was a fag of Prout’s who appealed for rescue from Brer
Terrapin to Tar Baby; others, that the introits to the respective
creeds (“Ingle-go-jang”--“Ti-yi-Tungalee!”) carried in themselves the
seeds of dissent. At any rate, the cleavage developed as swiftly as
in a new religion, and by tea-time when they were fairly hoarse, the
rolling world was rent to the death between Ingles _versus_ Tungles,
and Brer Terrapin had swept out Number Eleven form-room to the
War-cry: “Here I come a-bulgin’ and a-bilin’.” Prep stopped further
developments, but they agreed that, as a recreation for wet autumn
evenings, the jape was unequalled, and called for its repetition on
Saturday.
That was a brilliant evening, too. Both sides went into prayers
practically re-dressing themselves. There was a smell of singed fag
down the lines and a watery eye or so; but nothing to which the most
fastidious could have objected. The Reverend John hinted something
about roof-lifting noises.
“Oh, _no_, Padre, Sahib. We were only billin’ an’ cooin’ a bit,” Stalky
explained. “We haven’t really begun. There’s goin’ to be a tug-o’-war
next Saturday with Miss Meadow’s bed-cord----”
“‘Which in dem days would ha’ hilt a mule,’” the Reverend John quoted.
“Well, I’ve got to be impartial. I wish you both good luck.”
The week, with its three paper-chases, passed uneventfully, but for a
certain amount of raiding and reprisals on new lines that might have
warned them they were playing with fire. The Juniors had learned to
use the sacred war-chants as signals of distress; oppressed Ingles
squealing for aid against oppressing Tungles, and _vice versa_; so
that one never knew when a peaceful form-room would flare up in
song and slaughter. But not a soul dreamed, for a moment, that that
Saturday’s jape would develop into--what it did! They were rigidly
punctilious about the ritual; exquisitely careful as to the weights
on Miss Meadow’s bed-cord, kindly lent by Richards, who said he knew
nothing about mules, but guaranteed it would hold a barge’s crew; and
if Dick Four chose to caparison himself as Archimandrite of Joppa,
black as burned cork could make him, why, Stalky, in a nightgown kilted
up beneath his sweater, was equally the Pope Symmachus, just converted
from heathendom but given to alarming relapses.
It began after tea--say 6.50 P. M. It got into its stride by 7.30 when
Turkey, with pillows bound round the ends of forms, invented the Royal
Battering-Ram Corps. It grew and--it grew till a quarter to nine when
the Prefects, most of whom had fought on one side or the other, thought
it time to stop and went in with ground-ashes and the bare hand for ten
minutes....
Honours for the action were not awarded by the Head till Monday morning
when he dealt out one dozen lickings to selected seniors, eight
“millies” (one thousand), fourteen “usuals” (five hundred lines), minor
impositions past count, and a stoppage of pocket-money on a scale and
for a length of time unprecedented in modern history.
He said the College was within an ace of being burned to the ground
when the gas-jet in Number Eleven form-room--where they tried to burn
Tar Baby, fallen for the moment into the hands of the enemy--was
wrenched off, and the lit gas spouted all over the ceiling till some
one plugged the pipe with dormitory soap. He said that nothing save
his consideration for their future careers kept him from expelling
the wanton ruffians who had noosed all the desks in Number Twelve
and swept them up in one crackling mound, barring a couple that had
pitch-poled through the window. This, again, had been no man’s design
but the inspiration of necessity when Tar Baby’s bodyguard, surrounded
but defiant, was only rescued at the last minute by Turkey’s immortal
flank-attack with the battering-rams that carried away the door of
Number Nine. He said that the same remarks applied to the fireplace and
mantelpiece in Number Seven which everybody had seen fall out of the
wall of their own motion after Brer Terrapin had hitched Miss Meadow’s
bed-cord to the bars of the grate.
He said much more, too; but as King pointed out in Common Room that
evening, his canings were inept, he had _not_ confiscated the Idols
and, above all, had not castigated, as King would have castigated, the
disgusting childishness of all concerned.
“Well,” said Little Hartopp. “I saw the Prefects choking them off as
we came into prayers. You’ve reason to reckon that in the scale of
suffering.”
“And more than half the damage was done under _your_ banner, King,” the
Reverend John added.
“That doesn’t affect my judgment; though, as a matter of fact, I
believe Brer Terrapin triumphed over Tar Baby all along the line.
Didn’t he, Prout?”
“It didn’t seem to me a fitting time to ask. The Tar Babies were
handicapped, of course, by not being able to--ah--tackle a live animal.”
“I confess,” Mr. Brownell volunteered, “it was the studious perversity
of certain aspects of the orgy which impressed _me_. And yet, what can
one exp----”
“How do you mean?” King demanded. “Dickson Quartus may be eccentric,
but----”
“I was alluding to the vile and calculated indecency of that black
doll.”
Mr. Brownell had passed Tar Baby going down to battle, all round and
ripe, before Turkey had begun to use it as Bishop Odo’s holy-water
sprinkler.
“It is possible you didn’t----”
“_I_ never noticed anything,” said Prout. “If there had been, I should
have been the first----”
Here Little Hartopp sniggered, which did not cool the air.
“Peradventure,” King began with due intake of the breath. “Peradventure
even _I_ might have taken cognizance of the matter both for my own
House’s sake and for my colleague’s.... No! Folly I concede. Utter
childishness and complete absence of discipline in _all_ quarters, as
the natural corollary to dabbling in so-called transatlantic humour, I
frankly admit. But that there was anything esoterically obscene in the
outbreak I absolutely deny.”
“They’ve been fighting for weeks over those things,” said Mr. Prout.
“’Silly, of course, but I don’t see how it can be dangerous.”
“Quite true. Any House-master of experience knows _that_, Brownell,”
the Reverend John put in reprovingly.
“Given a normal basis of tradition and conduct--certainly,” Mr.
Brownell answered. “But with such amazing traditions as exist here,
no man with any experience of the Animal Boy can draw your deceptive
inferences. That’s all _I_ mean.”
Once again, and not for the first time, but with greater heat he
testified what smoking led to--what, indeed, he was morally certain
existed in full blast under their noses....
Gloves were off in three minutes. Pessimists, no more than poets,
love each other, and even when they work together it is one thing
to pessimise congenially with an ancient and tried associate who is
also a butt, and another to be pessimised over by an inexperienced
junior, even though the latter’s college career may have included more
exhibitions--nay, even pot-huntings--than one’s own. The Reverend John
did his best to pour water on the flames. Little Hartopp, perceiving
that it was pure oil, threw in canfuls of his own, from the wings.
In the end, words passed which would have made the Common Room
uninhabitable for the future, but that Macrea had written (the Reverend
John had seen the letter) saying that his knee was fairly re-knit and
he was prepared to take on again at half-term. This happened to be the
only date since the Creation beyond which Mr. Brownell’s self-respect
would not permit him to stay one hour. It solved the situation, amid
puffings and blowings and bitter epigrams, and a most distinguished
stateliness of bearing all round till Mr. Brownell’s departure.
* * * * *
“My dear fellow!” said the Reverend John to Macrea, on the first night
of the latter’s return. “I _do_ hope there was nothing in my letters
to you--you asked me to keep you posted--that gave you any idea King
wasn’t doing his best with your House according to his lights?”
“Not in the least,” said Macrea. “I’ve the greatest respect for King,
but after all, one’s House is one’s House. One can’t stand it being
tinkered with by well-meaning outsiders.”
To Mr. Brownell on Bideford station-platform, the Reverend John’s last
words were:
“Well, well. You mustn’t judge us too harshly. I dare say there’s a
great deal in what you say. Oh, yes! King’s conduct was inexcusable,
absolutely inexcusable! About the smoking? Lamentable, but we must all
bow down, more or less, in the House of Rimmon. _We_ have to compete
with the Crammers’ Shops.”
To the Head, in the silence of his study, next day: “He didn’t seem
to me the kind of animal who’d keep to advantage in our atmosphere.
Luckily he lost his temper (King and he are own brothers) and he
couldn’t withdraw his resignation.”
“Excellent. After all, it’s only a few pounds to make up. I’ll slip it
in under our recent--er--barrack damages. And what do _We_ think of it
all, Gillette?”
“_We_ do not think at all--any of us,” said the Reverend John. “Youth
is its own prophylactic, thank Heaven.”
And the Head, not usually devout, echoed, “Thank Heaven!”
* * * * *
“It was worth it,” Dick Four pronounced on review of the
profit-and-loss account with Number Five in his study.
“Heap-plenty-_bong-assez_,” Stalky assented.
“But why didn’t King ra’ar up an’ cuss Tar Baby?” Beetle asked.
“You preter-pluperfect, fat-ended fool!” Stalky began--
“Keep your hair on! We _all_ know the Idolaters wasn’t our Uncle
Stalky’s idea. But why didn’t King----”
“Because Dick took care to paint Brer Terrapin King’s House-colours.
You can always conciliate King by soothin’ his putrid
_esprit-de-maisong_. Ain’t that true, Dick?”
Dick Four, with the smile of modest worth unmasked, said it was so.
“An’ now,” Turkey yawned. “King an’ Macrea’ll jaw for the rest of the
term how he ran his house when Macrea was trying to marry fat widows in
Switzerland. Mountaineerin’! ’Bet Macrea never went near a mountain.”
“’One good job, though. I go back to Macrea for Maths. He _does_ know
something,” said Stalky.
“Why? Didn’t ‘Mister’ know anythin’?” Beetle asked.
“’Bout as much as _you_,” was Stalky’s reply.
“_I_ don’t go about pretending to. What was he like?”
“‘Mister’? Oh, rather like King--King and water.”
Only water was not precisely the fluid that Stalky thought fit to
mention.
[1] See “Slaves of the Lamp”--_Stalky and Co._